Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchAnton Bruckner: The Sonic Cathedrals and Troubled Legacy of Classical Music's Most Insecure Genius
Episode 6968
Anton Bruckner wrote symphonies of cathedral-like grandeur — vast, slow-building structures that critics either worshiped or despised. He was also pa…
1 week, 2 days ago
Claude Debussy: The Serene Impressionist Whose Private Life Was Anything But Peaceful
Episode 6970
Claude Debussy composed music of such shimmering beauty that critics called him an Impressionist — a label he hated. Behind the luminous surfaces of …
1 week, 2 days ago
El Greco: The Painter Whose Three-Hundred-Year Rebellion Against Convention Finally Won
Episode 6971
El Greco painted elongated figures, unnatural colors, and compositions so strange that his contemporaries thought he was going blind. For three centu…
1 week, 2 days ago
Marcel Proust: The Social Climber Who Locked Himself in a Cork-Lined Room and Wrote a Masterpiece
Episode 6962
Marcel Proust spent his youth climbing the social ladder of Parisian high society, collecting aristocratic friendships and absorbing every detail of …
1 week, 2 days ago
Carl Friedrich Gauss: The Prince of Mathematics Who Sat on His Greatest Discoveries
Episode 6966
Carl Friedrich Gauss was called the "Prince of Mathematics" and is considered, alongside Euler, the greatest mathematician who ever lived. He made fo…
1 week, 2 days ago
Walt Whitman: The Original American Hustler Who Wrote His Own Rave Reviews
Episode 6965
Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass, wrote his own anonymous rave reviews in newspapers to promote it, and spent decades revising and expandi…
1 week, 2 days ago
Victor Hugo: The Radical Outlaw Life and Secret Codes of France's Greatest Literary Giant
Episode 6964
Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, but his life was as dramatic as his fiction. He served in the French legislature, w…
1 week, 2 days ago
Thomas Hardy: The Two Burials of a Novelist Whose Heart Ended Up in a Biscuit Tin
Episode 6963
Thomas Hardy wrote some of the most devastating novels in the English language — Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure — and then stopped writi…
1 week, 2 days ago
Herman Melville: The Resurrection of America's Most Neglected Masterpiece
Episode 6961
Herman Melville published Moby-Dick in 1851 to devastating reviews and dismal sales. He spent his remaining forty years working as a customs inspecto…
1 week, 2 days ago
Vaslav Nijinsky: The Rebel Dancer Who Redefined Male Ballet and Lost His Mind
Episode 6959
Vaslav Nijinsky could leap so high that audiences believed he was defying gravity. He was the most celebrated male dancer of the twentieth century an…
1 week, 2 days ago